Pushing the Envelope: The Millions Interviews Alex Gilvarry

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In recent years, three novels have caused me to gasp, “No!” while riding the New York City subway. The first two were The Mayor of Casterbridge and Portrait of a Lady. The third was Alex Gilvarry’s Eastman Was Here, the often comical story of Alan Eastman, a Norman Mailer-like writer who, as the novel progresses, displays increasingly appalling—and oddly amusing—gasp-inducing behavior.

Eastman is an almost pathological philanderer and liar, who in an effort to win back his wife and un-stall his literary career, accepts an assignment to report from Vietnam just before Saigon’s fall. Eastman is a selfish, narcissistic, womanizing blowhard—Mailer minus the charm and the literary genius. Gilvarry’s success at creating such a delightfully disagreeable anti-hero is an entertaining rebuttal to the notion that the protagonist of a novel ought to be likable.

Gilvarry’s first novel, From the Memoirs of an Enemy Non-Combatant, is the story of a young fashion-obsessed Filipino immigrant who is arrested and sent to Gitmo after he’s mistaken for a terrorist. Memoirs manages to be both funny and serious while depicting a shift in American ideas about freedom. With EastmanWas Here, Gilvarry delves into the past, but the new work is also a comment on how sensibilities have changed in the literary world—and the country as a whole.

Gilvarry and I were both fellows at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony, and we’ve run into one another at various Mailer-related events over the years. Our interview touched on the strengths and weaknesses of post-World War II American male novelists; Gilvarry’s good luck with mentors (Gary Shteyngart and Colum McCann); the research required to depict wartime Saigon; and why Gilvarry felt compelled to grapple with the legend of Norman Mailer.

The following is an edited version of our conversation.

TM: This is your second novel. Is the experience of being published different the second time around?

AG: A little bit. You kinda know what to expect. You don’t want to get your expectations too high. You’re more protective.

TM: Alan Eastman is clearly inspired by Norman Mailer. As I read the book, whenever there was a biographical similarity, I wrote Mailer’s initials: NM. I did this at least a couple of dozen times. The way I read it, Eastman is Mailer, but also not Mailer.

AG: Yeah, I think that’s a good read. Eastman is inspired by Mailer and is a little closer to him in biography at the beginning of his life: childhood, Harvard. They share those biographical details. I wanted him to be like Mailer and not be Mailer too. Probably when the action of the book begins, it splits. Then I fill him with an imaginary emotional life, not Mailer’s at all.

TM: There’s the presence in the novel of a second Maileresque figure, Norman Heimish, who is Eastman’s rival but in many ways seemed almost more like Mailer than Eastman. Why include Heimish in the book?

AG: I thought a character like Eastman needed a rival, somebody who he thought had it all who he had to measure himself up against. I feel like Mailer early on had that with James Jones. I get a lot of mileage when a character is angry. You know, to walk into a book store and see that somebody he despises is selling really well would really burns this guy [Eastman] up.

TM: You’re very interested in writers of the post-WWII generation. What draws you to them?

AG: I like the way novels are written in that period, the fifties, sixties, and seventies America. They’re written differently. They use language that’s taboo, that we don’t use any more. They don’t hold back in the way that my generation will sort of hold back a little.

TM: So there’s something fearless about those postwar writers?

AG: Yeah. Absolutely. They were pushing the envelope. If you just use the example of sex in their books. It’s done kind of fearlessly and shamelessly. And not always in a good way—but sometimes in a really good way. I wanted this book to feel like that, like it was written in that time. I didn’t live in the seventies. So I thought, How am I going to capture the feel of that period without doing all those cheesy period details? But if it could sound like a book from that time, I thought it would help the reality of the read.

TM: I thought also that you captured the philandering of the seventies male writer.

AG: Yeah. The scandals and the philandering—that’s a juicy period for that kind of stuff. Writers don’t really act like that anymore, or at least not in public. I liked writing about that and the incestuous publishing world of that time.

TM: And writers felt like they mattered more during that time.

AG: Yeah. You couldn’t really set this book now because writers aren’t as heralded as they were during that time. So it’s really like a time capsule that a man like Eastman could be like that.

TM: Of course, it’s a mistake to think of that as the good old days. But what I particularly enjoyed was that Eastman was so incredibly unlikeable and selfish. Every time you think he can’t be more selfish or betray another person, he just goes ahead. And you start to look forward to those moments of appalling behavior. But today we’re in a moment when it’s considered a valid piece of literary criticism to say of a novel, “I didn’t like the main character.” So I wonder if you had any internal voice—or any outside voices—who told you not to make Eastman such a wonderful bastard.

AG: Yeah, yeah. It’s a tough thing to do because you don’t want to lose your readers because of someone who is so unlikable. But I thought if I keep liking him, if I keep liking writing these scenes, then I think you’re going to like to read about this unlikable person. I was always thinking: Am I having fun with this scene? Is it entertaining at least in some way? That was sort of my guide. There were some places where I think the character went too far and maybe I had to edit it back. I had two great editors on this book—Patrick Nolan and Beena Kamlani, who is amazing. She was Saul Bellow’s editor for the last years of his life–a great, great editor. She was a really good voice for taming Eastman in certain places.

TM: So to ask the obvious question, what kind of research did you do for the scenes in the novel set in Saigon? Have you ever been to Ho Chi Minh City?

AG: I did go there while I was writing this book because I wanted to set the book in the hotels where all the correspondents stayed: the Continental Hotel and the Caravelle Hotel. And so I went to Vietnam and I kind of just stayed in the hotel where I was setting the novel and got a lay of the land. And I read a lot of great literature set in Vietnam. Gloria Emerson’sWinners andLosers–I really loved that book, and I’m really glad it’s now still in print because it was hard to get for a while. Norton has reprinted it.

TM: Your father is a Vietnam Veteran.

AG: Yeah, I’m probably drawn to the subject because of him. He was there and I heard his stories of being in Saigon. That city to him, it’s like a mythology. He remembers it in a great light, the way Saigon was. He would tell me all sorts of stories about what would go on there. So in some ways I was writing this for him, too.

TM: Has he read it?

AG: He did. He really loved it. He wants me to write a sequel. He’s said, ”I want to find out what happens to these characters. Please write a sequel.”

TM: I wanted to ask you about a passage that fascinated me. At one point you write, “The need to enlighten the world with Eastmanisms was exhausting and erroneous.” And Eastman realizes that “his urges were totalitarian.” To me, this seems like a criticism of Mailer as flawed by his narcissism. Did you intend it that way?

AG: Yeah, I think so. I think that’s a pretty good read. But not just Mailer. Many of the writers of that period were narcissists. I was really writing about Eastman first, but it is critical of that behavior for sure. And subconsciously, I felt that writing about a Norman Mailer-like character I have to make some judgements. There are things in Mailer’s life that are hard for me to reconcile. I think all of his readers who like his work, there’s something that’s a little tough to get around. I have that with Mailer.

TM: The character of the woman reporter Channing in the book was, I thought, very successful, and you did something that I don’t think Mailer ever did very well: created a female character.

AG: Thank you. I needed a strong female character to counterbalance Eastman, and one of the biggest criticisms of Bellow and Mailer and Roth is that they have very thin female characters. So I really needed to reach deep and develop a character that I liked. I think in my first novel I didn’t pay too much attention to the women characters. It came out a little flimsy. I agreed with that critique whenever I got it, so I wanted to correct that about my storytelling and my writing. I wanted to be aware of it.

TM: What was it like being this literary-minded kid growing up in the only borough in New York that voted for Donald Trump?

AG: When I was a kid in Staten Island, I hadn’t even discovered novels. I discovered novels really late; I wanted to write screenplays and write for television because I thought that’s what writers did now. I went to Hunter College in Manhattan. I have a lot in common with Eastman, I think, because growing up in Staten Island, I sort of grew up with a chip on my shoulder, with that feeling that I’ve got to prove myself to people—to people from Manhattan, the Upper East Side. I think I even came into the book business with a chip on my shoulder, like I had to prove myself somehow. It drove me. But you’ve got to realize it. Otherwise, this kind of thinking can destroy you.

TM: And you’ve got these great literary credentials: you worked for Gary Shteyngart and studied with Colin McCann. Can you talk about how this affected the way you write a novel?

AG: Gary Shteyngart was actually the first writer I ever met. He was a teacher at Hunter College when I was an undergraduate, and he had just come out with his first novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, and I didn’t know novels could be that funny. I didn’t know people still wrote novels until I met him. I thought all the great writers were dead. I was much more of a film buff. And I got to meet Gary at a really great time in my life. His work inspired me and I wanted to write just like him.

TM: And you got an MFA, right?

AG: I took a number of years off after I graduated from college and I worked in the publishing industry. And then when I started thinking of a novel of my own, I really needed help. I didn’t know what I was doing. So I went back to Hunter to get an MFA, and I was lucky to meet Colum McCann and he really dug my work. He really believed in what I was doing and thought it was important and gave me a lot of confidence and a lot of support. [Shteyngart and McCann] are really important in my life because I look at them as sort of outsiders. I had something in common with them. They were two outsiders, but they both had an incredible desire to write well and make it. That might just be my impression of it, but they were always going to get there. Their careers were inspiring to me. Their work was inspiring. I learned the most from Colum McCann on a sentence level. And then when I got to work for Gary [as a research assistant] for his book Super Sad True Love Story, I learned the most from Gary about how to research a book and how to fake what you don’t know. I learned the way he can make something seem real. I learned so much from him, things like descriptions. Do descriptions have to come from yourself? No, you can actually research that stuff too.

TM: Well, your descriptions work. As something of an old Jew myself, I thought you captured that mentality in Eastman very nicely.

AG: Well, you know, I’m a New Yorker, so I feel like it’s the same kind of thing. This might not count for anything, but this Christmas I had a DNA test and it turns out that I’m one percent Ashkenazi Jewish. And it’s what I always wanted to be. I wanted to be a New York Jewish writer.

Dan Chaon's most recent novel, Await Your Reply, is a masterful tale of identity and how it's made, stolen, and remade. The book, with its three interlocking stories, and locales as disparate as Las Vegas, Nebraska, and the Arctic, is intensely readable, but as Janet Maslin of The New York Times points out, "...the real pleasure in reading Mr. Chaon is less in finding out where he’s headed than in savoring what he accomplishes along the way." Chaon is also the author of the novel, You Remind Me of Me, and two short story collections, Fitting Ends, and Among the Missing, which was nominated for the National Book Award. He was my creative writing teacher at Oberlin College, where he is the Irvin E. Houck Associate Professor of the Humanities.The Millions: What really struck me about this book was how realistic and specific your characters felt, even as some of them dissolved and became nothing more than a name, a wardrobe, a series of gestures and ways of speaking. At the same time, though, other characters remained real—and, this isn’t exactly the right word—pure. How did you go about creating the different characters for this novel? How important was it that they all be believable, and what does that mean for this kind of book?
Dan Chaon: The book was written in little pieces, almost like a series of short-short stories in the beginning. When I started, I didn’t know anything but little glimmers—scenes—that eventually began to fit together. In general I don’t plan out my characters in advance. Mostly, I begin with images, moments—a severed hand in an ice bucket, a lighthouse on the prairie, a guy driving down the Dempster Highway toward the Arctic Ocean. Once I had the moment in my head, I began to circle out and try to understand the people who were involved. So I suspect that my experience of writing the book, and the discoveries that I made as I went along, are not so different from the readers’ experience. The characters all started out as “real” to me—I was getting to know them as I went along, the same way you get to know friends over time--and I was as shocked as anyone when some of them turned out to be fakes. You say that some of the characters “remained real—and this isn’t exactly the right word—pure,” --but I actually think this is exactly the right coinage. Pure. I really like that word. That’s one of the issues that I was thinking of when I was writing. What is a “real” self? What is a “pure” representation of character? Is it just a consistent set of behaviors? Is there something truly essential that makes you, you? I don't think I came up with an answer, but it was fun to think about.
TM: In your acknowledgments, you write that Await Your Reply pays homage to various writers you’ve loved, from Ray Bradbury to Shirley Jackson to Peter Straub, among others. What was the extent of your “gestures and winks” toward their work? Is this your own playful, literary version of identity theft?
DC: One of my early jobs when I was first out of undergrad was as a DJ. This was back in the late eighties, when the concepts of the “mash-up” and sampling were still in their infancy. But there was something about that concept that I really, really liked—the way the songs seemed to be having a conversation with one another, and by being combined actually transformed into something new. I’d like to think that there’s some of that going on here, too. Many of the “samples” are tucked into the imagery, like Easter eggs: for example, readers of Lovecraft’sAt the Mountains of Madness and Poe’sNarrative of Arthur Gordon Pym will recognize those birds that are circling Miles in the Arctic, with their cry of “tekeli-li!”; people who have seen Takashi Miike’s movie, The Audition, will recognize that horrific piano wire in Chapter 2; people who have read Shirley Jackson’sThe Haunting of Hill House will notice echoes of poor Eleanor Vance’s final thoughts... and—well, let’s just say that there are a few dozen of these throughout the book, which some people might enjoy finding themselves. But my intent wasn’t merely to create a bunch of cute in-jokes, either. To a larger extent, I was using these little touchstones to draw forth a particular texture and mood. For me, it was almost an invocation, a séance. That Ouija Board is in Jay’s house for a reason!
As a writer, I feel like I’m always in conversation with the books that I’ve read. Occasionally, an interviewer will ask: “Who are you writing for? Who is your audience?” And in many ways the answer is that I’m writing for those authors I’ve loved, and the books I’ve loved. If you’re an avid reader, and a book gets under your skin, it can affect you as intensely as a real human relationship, it lingers with you for your whole life, and there is always this desire to re-experience that amazing sense of connection you get from “your books.” I understand completely why people want to write fan fiction. To me, I guess, all fiction is fan fiction at a certain level, just as it always has an element of identity theft.
TM: Do you see your novel as a kind of Nabokovian puzzle, to be unwrapped and unlocked by discerning readers of the future? How far does the rabbit hole go?
DC: As much as I’m flattered by the term “Nabokovian,” I’m not sure that I’m capable of that level of gamesmanship. I’m sure that a literary critic could footnote the hell out of the book, but I suspect that a great number of the references she’d find here would be unintentional, or accidental, or drawn unconsciously from the cultural ether. A couple of years ago, I wrote the Afterward for the Signet Classic edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’sDr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and one of the things that struck me, re-reading that novel for the first time in many years, was how much of my recollection of the book was simply wrong. Major scenes that I remembered vividly simply weren’t there in the text. In fact, as it turned out, my memory of Dr. Jekyll had been so radically infected by the enormous number of other representations that were floating around in the culture—movies and comics and parodies and so forth—that it was difficult to read the “real” version without filling in aspects from the version I’d imagined, the version that I’d pieced together out of a vast array of cultural detritus. None of which had existed when the actual book was written. I hope that something similar may happen to readers of Await Your Reply, and that in this way the “rabbit hole” goes on into Fibonacci-like infinity. I set out to draw on some of the archetypal plots that I had always found most compelling—the Bluebeard story, the evil twin story, the mythology of shapeshifters, legends of ghosts and haunted places and fruitless quests into the wastelands—all of which, of course, were viral memes for centuries before the internet existed. I suspect that the reader will be reminded of a whole set of references and touchstones as they read—but that their footnotes would be idiosyncratic, a kind of private, Kinbote-like appendix for each individual reader.
TM: This novel is ingeniously structured, with three narratives that eventually overlap and lock together. Part of the fun of reading it is figuring that puzzle out. How did you put together this little narrative machine? None of it feels accidental—but can that be?
DC: When I started out, I didn’t have any idea how the three threads were connected. I just knew that they were—somehow. The first hundred pages of the book took me about two years to write. I revised and revised, and fiddled around with the personalities of the characters, and added and deleted subplots and minor characters—basically trying to frame out the farmland that I was going to be working with, cutting brush and taking rocks out of the soil and so forth. The second hundred pages took about nine months. This was when I began to use cliff-hangers at the end of each chapter, leaving each thread with an unanswered question that I had to figure out, and that pushed things forward for me more quickly. At this point, I was showing the book chapter by chapter to my editor, Anika Streitfeld, and to my wife, the writer Sheila Schwartz. They would each give me a little feedback and I’d float various plot concepts—which Anika or Sheila or both of them would frequently, kindly, shoot down, or talk me through. The last hundred pages was written in a little less than two months, but it really wasn’t until the final few chapters that I truly had everything figured out. The last bit of plot clicked into place the way a difficult math problem sometimes does. Bing! Suddenly it seems so obvious! And I remember e-mailing Anika at about four in the morning. “Does this sound crazy???" I had to go back and do some adjustment and revision—but it was actually quite surprising to me to discover how much of the plot was already there, embedded in the narrative without my noticing. It didn’t actually require a lot of rewriting. My wife Sheila died of cancer not long after I’d finished the final revisions, and it’s both difficult and comforting now to look at this book, since there is so much of her in it, chapter by chapter: her advice and thoughts and spirit. She wrote in pencil on the last page of the last chapter: “You did it, honey!” But really we did it together.
TM: As Await Your Reply progresses, it hearkens more and more to an old-fashioned thriller or horror tale, with its level of suspense, its secrets and plot revelations, and its pervading sense of unease. This, for me, felt simultaneously like a departure and continuation from your earlier work, if that makes any sense. What say you?
DC: I’ve been deeply influenced by two strains of North American fiction: first, by the realistic regionalism of writers like Alice Munro, Raymond Carver, Sherwood Anderson, and so forth; and secondly, by writers of dark fantasy like Peter Straub, Shirley Jackson, and Ray Bradbury, etc. I’ve tended to be categorized more with the former group, the regional realists, but I think that you could make a good case to classify my work with the latter as well. My short story collection, Among the Missing, was strongly influenced by the tradition of ghostly and supernatural tales, and my first novel, You Remind Me of Me, was drawing very heavily from tales of psychological suspense and Kafkaesque otherworldliness—not intended to be straightforward melodrama, though I think it was often taken as such. I learned a lot about novel-writing from You Remind Me of Me—the effects that I wanted, and those that I didn’t—and I deliberately wanted to go back to the multiple narrative, round-robin style of storytelling, and see if I could build on what I had figured out. Around the time I was finishing You Remind Me of Me, I also happened to write a story for McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, edited by Michael Chabon. Chabon’s project was to combine so-called literary writing with pulp and genre storytelling elements, and I was very much inspired by what he had to say. I felt like the story I wrote, “The Bees,” was a breakthrough for me, and I learned a lot from writers like Karen Joy Fowler, Kelly Link, George Saunders, Arthur Phillips, Kevin Brockmeier—and many others—who were doing interesting work with genre-bending. I have to say, though, that perhaps the biggest cultural influences on the novel were my teenaged sons, Philip and Paul, and the books and movies and TV shows that they loved and which permeated our household—Garth Nix’sAbhorsen trilogy of books, and Philip Pullman’sHis Dark Materials, the TV show “Lost,” the films Fight Club and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, all the various good, smart stuff which one or both of my kids were obsessed with...
TM: In a 2004 interview with Poets and Writers Magazine, you remarked: “I've written stories since I was a little kid. To me there's something compelling about being a different person for a little while and trying out a different kind of life.” I couldn’t help but read Await Your Reply as partly a meditation on fiction writing and reading. In the book, when Ryan muses that identities are like shells that “you stepped into and that began to solidify over time… They began to take on a life of their own, developed substance,” I thought of my own creative process of inhabiting characters. And Ryan’s sadness after retiring an identity articulated so well that peculiar grief of finishing a manuscript, or a beloved book. Were these nods to the writing and reading life intentional? Furthermore, do you think fiction writing is somewhat criminal—is it a weird invasion of privacy, this theft and composite of various real lives? Do readers understand best the lure of identity theft, the chance to live another’s life for a while? And, when you spend a large part of your time making up stories and reading made up stories, where does real life begin and end? What makes some human beings real, and some fictional?
DC: Gee, Edan. You articulate things so well here that I barely have to answer! Yes to all of these. I think that as a teacher of creative writing, it’s inevitable that you think a lot about the creative process, and that you spend a lot of time trying to articulate how it works and why it is important, especially in a world that students face in which this kind of thinking isn’t taken seriously, when it’s seen as frivolous—or worse. One of the things that I talk about frequently with my students is the act of empathy—the act of trying to imagine yourself in the position of someone else—and the way this can be scary, and transgressive, and even dangerous. One of my assignments in my fiction class is to ask students to write from the point of view of someone radically different from themselves—to speak in the voice of a different gender or ethnicity or class, to try to think as far outside themselves as they can go, to try to inhabit that person—and for many of my students this feels perilous, even morally problematic.
I remember one time we had a discussion in class about a sensational news story. An insane woman had kidnapped a pregnant mother, and had killed the mother and performed a c-section and claimed the baby as her own. A truly horrifying tale. And we had been talking about it in class, and I asked: which character would you choose if you were writing a story? The pregnant mother or the insane woman who took the baby? At that point, a young woman spoke up, a sophomore. “My God!” she said. “The ghost of that dead woman is probably spitting on us as we sit here talking about this!” I think that was you, Edan, who was so appalled. I remember that it gave me pause: At what point does imagining, does the attempt to inhabit, become wrong? At what point does it become morally repugnant? I still think: never. But I understand that it’s fraught, that it’s compromised, that it’s suspect. That it’s an invasion that borders on—or crosses over into—the criminal. During the writing of this book, I followed the exploits of a number of trolls who used invented personas to invade and then (often hilariously) disrupt various solemn internet message boards. I read about a depressed teen who was goaded into suicide by a cruel classmate’s mother who was pretending to be the poor girl’s “boyfriend” on MySpace. I myself set up a dummy email address and briefly tried out various fake personas to see what would happen.
Where does real life begin and end? What makes some human beings real, and some fictional? I don’t know the answer. For better or worse, the answers to these questions seem to be changing all the time, and maybe there is no true answer.
TM: There’s an incredibly eerie and memorable second-person chapter at the end of Part One, where the narrator describes “your” identity being stolen, which, “Isn’t necessarily you, of course…you are aware of your life as a continuous thread, a dependable unfolding story of yourself that you are telling yourself.” This chapter has the great power of planting paranoia in the reader’s mind, and forces her to question her own identity and notions of self. As I kept reading, though, I found myself feeling paranoid about everything in the book—pretty soon I couldn’t trust anyone! Um, Dan? How in the hell did you do this?
DC: This chapter emerged from a late night free-write, which wasn’t originally intended to be anything but a journal entry. I was at a point when I needed to try to explain to myself what the book was about, and this was one of the few chapters (the final chapter, Chapter 26, is the other) which came out in one draft, with very little revision. It felt like an inner voice that was speaking to me—a very eerie feeling for me as well.
TM: About the aforementioned chapter: why the second person? It’s interesting, because while it’s about identity theft, it’s not taking away my identity, but, rather, giving me a different one. In the text, I’m pulling off a snowy interstate—“And you wipe off the snow in your hair”—when in fact this reader lives in Los Angeles! What went into this particular narrative choice?
DC: The narrative movement of this chapter was weird for me. Originally, the narrator felt like me, Dan Chaon, the author—but then it moved into a more chilly and abstract omniscience, as if a little spark of myself had disconnected and was free-floating through the world, out-of-the-body travel, and then I found myself hovering over a stranger and entering into his consciousness. Becoming part of the scene, and taking on his life story and personality. I realize now that I was trying to model the process of transference—to describe in shorthand the way imaginative empathy works. “You” are not in Los Angeles any longer. You have become that melancholy middle-aged guy pumping gas in upstate New York.
There is a poem by my friend Liz Rosenberg called “The Accident,” which I think about a lot. In the poem, a woman who is driving down the interstate observes the death of a motorcyclist from a distance, and there is an incredibly beautiful use of second person that I have always admired. “You are still you, but changing fast,” says the narrator of Liz Rosenberg's poem, and she is both talking to the dying motorcycle guy and to herself.
TM: Has teaching at Oberlin influenced you as a writer? How do you manage to give students a sense of artistic freedom, while also offering them straightforward advice on technique and form?
DC: I love teaching, and I particularly like that moment when a student begins to discover the subject matter and voice that makes them unique. That’s a real high for me and it’s what keeps me coming back, semester after semester. It’s such a pleasure to be around people who care passionately about books and writing and who have singular perspectives about the world, which is what I find almost across the board with Oberlin students. I do find that I learn a lot from students, too. The thing about teaching fiction is that there isn’t one answer to a problem—there’s no rulebook or easy fix. I learn a lot about my own process from helping students find solutions to the various issues that emerge when you’re working through a draft. Not to get all new-agey, but there’s a lot of good energy that comes out of it.
TM: Have you noticed any popular themes or concepts in this current era of undergraduate writers?
DC: I notice a lot more post-apocalyptic scenarios these days, and I’m aware that as a generation this new group is pretty scared and pessimistic about the future they’re being left with. In general, there’s less interest in straightforward realism than there used to be. It remains very difficult to get anyone under 21 interested in Alice Munro or William Trevor, but I guess that’s as it should be. It’s hard, at my students' age, to be sympathetic with the very middle-aged concerns of those two greats. All in good time, right?
TM: Because this is a book site, and because I know for a fact that you are a voracious, insane reader, I must ask you: What was the last great book you read?
DC:Lies Will Take You Somewhere, by my wife, Sheila Schwartz—and not just because we were married, either. I learned nearly everything I know about writing from her, and it’s a flat-out brilliant book: dark, funny, and strange in all the right ways.

Future Missionaries of America by Matthew Vollmer and Floodmarkers by Nic Brown are short story collections from debut writers with enormous gifts. Their work is beautiful, funny, and delightfully weird. Matthew and Nic were my classmates at Iowa, where they proved to be not only talented writers, but also sharp and passionate readers. Since they're pals, I thought it would be fun if Matthew and Nic interviewed each other about their books. It's a real thrill for me to see their stories in print, and to have them on The Millions.In this second installment, Nic interviews Matthew about Future Missionaries of America. Of the book, the New York Times Book Review said, "Vollmer writes with equal dexterity about teenagers and adults, men and women, atheists and believers, Goths and jocks, dropouts and doctors - less interested in getting down any particular demographic, it would seem, than in revealing the humans beneath. Expertly structured and utterly convincing, these stories represent the arrival of a strong new voice." In part one, Matthew interviewed Nic.Nic Brown: In your book, you write several amazing, matter-of-fact, contemporary, and complicated stories involving aspects of Christianity - namely Seventh Day Adventists. I know you have some family background with this religion. Did you feel uncomfortable at any point writing about people of this faith (and those only encountering it, like the protagonist of the book's title story), or worried about how any Seventh Day Adventists you know would react? How have they reacted?Matthew Vollmer: Yes, it's true I grew up Seventh-day Adventist. People may find it hard to believe that stopping each week for 24 hours (sundown Friday to sundown Saturday) to rest, reflect, and abstain from "secular" activities (TV watching, sports, shopping, school, work, reading Mad magazine, etc.) could be great, but by and large being an SDA kid was pretty great, at least in my family. Sure, my church and grade school (and boarding academy) had some kooks, but as you pointed out in your interview, we're all freaks and there are kooks everywhere. When you grow up SDA, you grow up in a very tight knit group of people, the majority of whom like to have fun, even if they don't, by and large, dance or participate in competitive sports or listen to rock n roll or endorse the consumption of alcohol, drugs, tobacco, or "flesh foods." I suppose my problem began to emerge in college, once I started to ask questions about the "27 Fundamental Beliefs." Also, I started to meet people who weren't SDA. I started to appreciate different cultures, different cultural experiences, and eventually, I just found the SDA culture much too inhibitive, too insular. From my perspective, the SDA church was one that wanted to provide answers for why everything is the way it is. And those answers were often unsatisfying. Not to mention I surrendered the idea of having to have an answer for everything. I realized that sometimes, it's okay for things to remain mysterious.For years I'd tried to write about the SDA experience. But usually, when I did, I aimed at the easiest possible targets, like hypocritical characters, or characters who cherish some secret sin or something; I wrote one really terrible story about a church Treasurer, who had a crush on a teenage boy operating a soft serve yogurt machine. But those stories didn't work as well; they seemed forced - as artificial and agenda-ridden as the bedtime stories I listened to as a kid, where "little Sammy never disobeyed his mommy and daddy again!" It wasn't until I stumbled upon the idea of writing about outsiders who experience SDA culture that I found I could really capture both the strangeness and earnestness of SDAs, and use representations of that culture as fuel for the story. Also, I could harness the energies of my own desire (and failure) to fully understand this peculiar group of people, while portraying them as real people with real struggles. Hopefully, despite the fact that SDAs might seem strange, I hope people will see them in a favorable light.As for SDA reactions: I only know what people in my family have said (though I predict that plenty would be scandalized by the book). My father, who is one of my biggest supporters, has, as of this writing, still not read the book - but that's not saying a lot: he's more of a Suduku player and internet news reader. My mom read most of the stories beforehand, I think, and will usually offer some sort of vague praise, like, "I just don't know how you do it," or, "How do you think this stuff up?!" Which is sort of how my grandmother reacted. Imagine the nicest and sweetest person on the planet, a woman who has never said anything bad about anybody (and who always, always counteracts criticism of someone else with something positive), and who, when she sees a sex scene in a movie, says, "Aw... I was hoping they weren't going to be naughty!" And then imagine her reading a story collection by her grandson that's filled with foul language, sex scenes, violence, and all sorts of pathological behaviors. You know what she said? "It's not exactly my cup of tea, but what an amazing imagination you have!"Finally (I know this is a long response, but you ask me about this SDA stuff and it really gets me going), my Uncle Don, whom I adore, and who played in a folk band in the 60s (and recently revived that band) that was the equivalent of the Grateful Dead for SDAs, asked me if he'd be able to use my book for devotionals with his church members. It was a joke, of course, and we both laughed, but I couldn't stop thinking about that. Like, why couldn't he use the book for devotionals? It was and is a book about people trying to figure out life and how to live it. So I wrote him and told him what I thought and lo and behold, he not only agreed, but said he'd felt bad about making that joke.NB: You have some amazing settings: a national park, a laboratory researching hemophiliac dogs, an exhibition of preserved and dissected human bodies, and a religious boarding school, to name just a few. Can you talk about your inspiration for these?MV: Evoking setting and using it to generate various effects in stories is one of my favorite things to do. I don't travel that much, but (thanks in part to friends & relatives who've been spread over the globe, some as missionaries) I've had the opportunity to see a lot of the world. Every setting in the book, I think, is a setting that I've visited in "real life." I worked at Yellowstone. I worked at a laboratory researching hemophiliac dogs & pigs. I worked as a field technician in Purdue's entomology department. I lived in Chapel Hill. I visited Idaho, Atlanta, Carolina Beach. And I attended a religious boarding school in north Georgia. All these settings offered up (at some point) ideas for characters and stories about those characters. Some characters are based on people I encountered in these places (like Mark Scheider, for instance). Others, like the widow in "Second Home," I came up with on my own. That particular story suggested itself during a visit with my parents and aunt and uncle to a cabin on Lake Sunnapee in New Hampshire. To avoid the older folks, I took a walk through the woods to another lake house, looked around, saw nobody was home, opened the door, and walked inside. I guess that was probably illegal, but I'm glad I did it. I stole a story from that house.NB: And - is there such a thing as a robotic human baby that records your interactions with it, as depicted in Future Missionaries of America? Or did you come up with this?MV: I get this question a lot. I WISH I'd come up with it. Maybe I should start saying that I did. At any rate, it's all real. I asked for information and the company said, "Are you an educator?" and I said yes so they sent me this brochure (which featured a cutaway diagram of one of the babies, which turned out to be really helpful) and a DVD (which I've since lost) that talked about how educators could use the babies in the classroom. It was awesome.NB: Stylistically, your stories are all over the place. You have a footnoted will (in "Will & Testament"), a transcript of an answering machine message ("Man-O'-War"), a few first person narrators, a few third person. Some are more prose-driven ("Oh Land of National Paradise, How Glorious are thy Bounties"), and some defy reality (like my favorite, "Stewards of the Earth"). Did these stories arise from formal experimentation, or did the narrative ideas warrant the differing storytelling techniques?MV: I'd ascribe the stylistic variations to several different factors. The first is that the stories in the collection came into being over the course of ten years. During that time, I played around with a lot of different styles and voices and narrative forms, and every year, the story manuscript evolved significantly. For a while, maybe during 02-03, I was really interested in the various forms a story could take and thought that it might be cool to publish a collection of stories in different sub-genres, since, in addition to the will and testament story, I had a story that took the form of the last entry in a hipster's blog, a letter from a deranged and estranged father to his son, and a story called "The Ghost of Bob Ross Paints Shit Town," which took the form of a transcript of one of Bob Ross' "The Joy of Painting" shows, only in this one, Bob Ross was dead and painting the neighborhood where I lived at the time, which included such characters a shirtless midget who liked to sit on the roof of his duplex, a boy with a rat tail, and a bearded man riding a moped with a parrot on his shoulder. Also, "The Gospel of Mark Schneider" was originally formatted like a series of chapters from the Bible, with a giant number at the beginning of each section and a number before each sentence (or verse). (At the time, however, VQR couldn't figure out how to translate that into whatever software they were using at the time, so I agreed to lose the formatting altogether, which was probably a good thing.)Basically, I get an idea for a story and hope the voice can generate enough energy to sustain the narrative.NB: In the story "Straightedge," a secondary character says that her father, "one of Marlon Brando's personal chefs, had acquired psychic powers after surviving an auto accident, and on the eve on the first moon walk, he'd dreamed of her mother... who he met the next day." I guess my question is: what? Did this actually come out of your brain?MV: Ha! Yes!NB: What are you working on now?MV: I'm about four-fifths of the way through a first draft of a novel about young woman who has to postpone her dreams of being a collegiate basketball star because she gets knocked up by a soldier during a furlough. The young woman goes to work at a dental office as a receptionist, has the baby. The baby's father comes back, but he's changed - he eats all the time, chews tobacco, drinks constantly (though he claims he can't get drunk), doesn't sleep, and is obsessed with playing a disturbingly realistic online computer game called Operation Brutal Humiliation. By chance, the young woman meets another man named Donnie Trueblood, a whitewater rafting guide who claims to be a shaman and who informs her that she's lost her power animal. The rest of the novel documents the young woman's quest to retrieve this power animal and restore the man she fell in love with. Along the way there's an overweight 12-year-old magician, a loudmouthed woman who extols the virtues of Christian sex toys, a six foot six barber with a goiter the size of a grapefruit in his neck, and a grandfather dressed up as a vampire.NB: Who do you like most: Desi Arnez, the Fonz, Magnum PI, McGiver, or John Locke from the TV show "Lost"?MV: McGiver? Do you mean MacGyver? McGiver! Sounds like some crazy new promotion at McDonald's. Anyway, no question. Magnum rules.Read part one in which Matthew interviews Nic.

Everyone who’s doing this has to make a series of moral compromises, and the question these compromises center around is, How big of an audience do you want to have? There’s a way to get your work out there that is legitimate, valid, and enviable, where your ethics aren’t compromised -- but the reality of that is that you sell to 500 people.

My body is flawed and also falls outside of specific culturally-acceptable parameters and is also actively oppressed. It experiences pleasure and brings me joy and it suffers; I fight against it and love it and accept it and loathe it. How better to grapple with these contradictions than write a book about it?